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National Geographic

The epic journey of Canada's last (and only) reindeer

As Canada's last free-ranging reindeer herd drives forward, just north of the Arctic Circle, the animals carry with them a link to a legendary experiment. It began about a hundred years ago, after the number of local caribou that the Inuvialuit long depended on began to decline and a bold plan was hatched to address food scarcity by importing reindeer. (Caribou and reindeer are the same species, but the latter have been domesticated.) Something similar had been tried at the turn of the century in nearby Alaska, when waves of reindeer boarded boats and trains to make improbable journeys from Siberia and Norway to North America. In late 1929, a chunk of what was then a burgeoning Alaska reindeer population—some 3,500 reindeer—set off for Canada under the care of Sami and Inuit herders. The arduous, zigzagging 1,500-mile journey ended up lasting more than five years, marking a difficult beginning to what came to be known as the Canadian Reindeer Project. (To save caribou, Indigenous people confront difficult choices.) Now, decades on, a group of Inuvialuit stakeholders is taking the project further into uncharted territory. The herd, which has been cared for with the help of the Inuvialuit but family owned, was formally purchased in 2021 by the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation. Under the watchful eyes of Esagok and his colleagues, the herd has more than doubled, to nearly 6,000 reindeer, making possible an ambitious plan to build a sustainable path to self-reliance for Inuvialuit people living on their ancestral lands. In March 1898, a shipment of reindeer makes its way north from Seattle, Washington, toward Alaska. Three decades later, as Alaska's reindeer population swelled, the Canadian government purchased its own herd and had it sent to the Northwest Territories. Photograph by PICTURE ART COLLECTION/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO 'The ultimate goal is to have reindeer abundantly available for Inuvialuit—that's goal number one,' said Brian Wade, director of the Inuvialuit Community Economic Development Organization. 'There's the food security component to this herd, but there's also job creation and the economic component to it.'